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Saturday, January 28, 2017

New York City is an international city. The wonderful variety is stimulating.

This is me with my new red hair with my painting.

Susan Grabel, curator, with Anne Drager at the opening reception.

The "narrative" of the painting was composed before the last presidential election.

I had anticipated a woman president of this nation. That was implied in the painting. Another painting I did on the subject of Anne Bynum and her treatment in the Arkansas justice system may have been better for the exhibit after our bizarre election.

It helps to pay more than one visit to
"Women Under Siege: It's Happening Right Here,"
a compact but wrenching group show at the feminist collective Ceres Gallery in
Chelsea, if only to read, process, and mourn the stories of women trapped in
the mesh of sexist laws, courts, and prisons to which each of the 25 works, by
as many artists, responds.

There's a lot to take in, including
some cases that made national news. One is that of Purvi Patel, charged with
feticide in Indiana after a stillbirth at home and sentenced to twenty years in
prison; she spent a year behind bars before the main conviction was reversed in
2016. A mounted paper collage by Marilyn Kiss, a Staten Island artist, centers
a three-headed Mike Pence — the former Indiana governor and newly sworn-in vice
president — amid images of Patel, with the warning "Purvi Patel Could Be Just
the Beginning."

Another familiar name is Marissa
Alexander, the Florida woman sentenced to twenty years in 2012 on aggravated
assault charges for firing a warning shot in the direction of her threatening,
abusive husband; she accepted a plea deal that led to her release in 2015, but
she remains a convicted felon. The New York artist Lynne Mayocole honors her
with a mask-like sculpture that revolves on its pedestal: The front shows
Alexander's face in a Pietà-like expression, while the back is divided,
dollhouse-style, into small scenes with printed captions that retell her story.

But most of these cases are less known;
curator Susan Grabel compiled them thanks to advocacy projects such as
UltraViolet and survivedandpunished.org. "It's
important to tell these stories and give a face to them," Grabel says.
Each one presents its own shocking details: Samantha Burton, of Tallahassee,
confined by court order to hospital after symptoms of pre-mature labor; Regina
McKnight, of South Carolina, charged with homicide after a stillbirth on
grounds of drug use; and other women from across the country, often prosecuted
for "failure to protect" a fetus or, in some instances, to protect
their children from the partner who abused them as well. Beside each work, in
lieu of standard wall text, is the artist's summary of the case. "I didn't
want art-speak up there," says Grabel. "This is about the women and
their stories."

A few of the subjects are left
anonymous, either at their own or their lawyers' request or by artist discretion.
Two, however, wrote replies that are posted beside the work that honors them.
One is Barbara Sheehan, a Queens woman who was acquitted of the murder of her
abusive husband, a police sergeant, but sentenced to five years for possession
of his gun; in the show, painter Elizabeth Downer Riker depicts her before her
suburban-style single-story house, holding her two children close. In her
reply, Sheehan, who is due for release in March, describes her frustration with
the criminal justice system and her plans, once freed, to advocate for victims
of domestic violence.

Everett’s Life’s Influences

Courtesy of Ceres Gallery

Fri., Jan. 27, 8:00pm

Another, Tondalao Hall, is midway
through a thirty-year sentence in Oklahoma for failure to protect her children
from her then-boyfriend, who got ten years after pleading guilty to child abuse
and served only two. Grabel's own contribution to the show is a sober print with
text that points out this disparity (Hall took a "blind plea deal"
without knowing what her sentence would be). In a handwritten note from prison
to Grabel, Hall writes, "Thank you so much for not forgetting about me. I
live by the truth will set you free....When I do get out I want to help other
women or anyone who is treated unjustly."

Grabel, a sculptor and printmaker in
her seventies, is based on Staten Island. She works on social themes, including
consumerism, homelessness, alienation, and, most recently, aging women's
bodies, using such techniques as cast-paper sculptures, collagraphs, and 3-D
printing. Grabel has also been involved for decades in the feminist art milieu
that emerged in the 1970s, crystallizing in cooperative galleries, feminist education
programs, and other alternative spaces. One of these was the New York Feminist
Art Institute, founded in 1979 by a group including the sculptor Nancy Azara
and painter Miriam Schapiro. Though the institute closed in 1990, the Ceres
Gallery, which began under its auspices, carries on both the politics and the
spirit of women's self-reliance of that time.

Indeed, Grabel's inspiration for
"Women Under Siege" came from a 2013 group show at Ceres with the
self-explanatory title "Meet My Uterus," as well as from the
discussions that ensued with activists for women's rights in the criminal
justice system, which brought home to her the extent of the crisis. In 2015,
Grabel sent out capsule stories of women to feature to some 100 artists,
including the 53 members of Ceres (who, by the gallery's rules, can submit work
to any group show it holds), inviting those interested to pick the story that
most resonated with them, research it further, and make whatever piece of art
it inspired.

Loren Dann, a painter who lives near
Philadelphia, produced one of the strongest and most jarring pieces. The image,
in oil on vintage paper, shows a woman's midsection that has been sliced off at
the upper torso and legs. Her belly, too, has been opened to reveal a grown
fetus, in the manner of Damien Hirst's The Virgin Mother sculpture but
with a much more clear and drastic message, with blood-like streaks of red
paint and a short text in pencil. It addresses the case of Laura Pemberton, a
Florida woman who underwent a court-ordered cesarean section in 1999.
"What bothered me the most is how they treated her like a slab of
meat," says Dann, who researched the case, including consulting doctors,
to form her impressions. "I pictured these men like at a butcher shop,
discussing how this baby was going to come out of her."

Another strong entry comes from
Montauk-based Anne Drager, whose litho-inked woodcut, in red and pink against a
black background, depicts a woman giving birth alone in a prison cell —
precisely what happened to Kari Parsons, a Maryland inmate, in 2005. Despite
horrific prison neglect, the fact that mother and baby survived made this one
of the less violent cases that Grabel offered, says Drager, and thus a bit
easier to take on. "It was an artistic challenge to express difficult
emotions," Drager says. "I chose one of the more benign cases,
because you have to get into it a little when you're doing the work."

The show also includes, in a separate
area, an installation by New York sculptor Francine Perlman that sets texts and
collages by women living in domestic violence shelters amid a field of angled
doors. It deviates slightly from the central theme of sexism in criminal
justice, but adds to the general urgency. At the time of this writing, most of
the Ceres artists were heading to Washington, D.C., for the Women's March on
January 21. "The erosion of women's rights has been going on for
years," says Grabel; resistance is now only more imperative. "I don't
know what form my activism is going to take," Grabel says. "But it's
going to take something, because otherwise I'm going to burst at the
seams."